Full Circle
by Donna di Scalotta
Summary: Charlus. James. Harry. Albus. Four generations of Potter men go off to war.


_**Full Circle**_

_**C**__harlus_

_  
"Roses are shining in Picardy,  
In the hush of the silvery dew.  
Roses are flow'ring in Picardy,  
But there's never a rose like you!"_

"And the roses will die with the summertime,  
And our roads may be far apart,  
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy!  
_'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart!"_

_**Roses of Picardy**_

**191****5**

Its summer and Charlus Potter's black hairs glistens a thousand shades of crimson and gold, in the last rays of the dying sun. Fionnghuala Burke pelts him with fat, red rosebuds and calls him a fool. Her long fair hair streams out untidily from her pretty sunbonnet – the straw one with the lavender ribbons that match her eyes – as she bends to tear off buds and leaves off the flowering trellis. "Oh you men!" she shrieks in a voice befitting the role she must play – that of the appropriately distressed and disapproving young maiden – "What need have you, pray, to run off and join some wild band of hooligans just because you feel defiant now that you're of age? It's not even your war, Charlus, it's a _Muggle _war! I loathe you!"

Charlus laughs and jumps nimbly off the porch. Love shines in his bright hazel eyes as he conjures a white rose with a wave of his wand. "Loathe me as heartily as you please, I'll always love you, Nola!" he says with the impulsiveness of a boy of eighteen, who's only knowledge of war is from romantic, epic ballads of glories won on honorable fields of combat.

"You scoundrel," Nola begins but begins to laugh as he scoops her in his arms and kisses her until she's breathless. "You _impertinent, _audacious blackguard," she finishes, straightening her ruffled white blouse and lavender skirt. "Goodness what would Grandmother say if she saw me and you?" She pulls off her bonnet and sets it on the wicker-work rocker, tucking his rose behind her ear.

He smiles down at her, at her piquant face with its pouting, little red lips and the haughtily-turned up nose. "She'd call you a trollop who'd better be off working in the Polyjuice Market and I wouldn't put it past the venerable dowager to place an _Avada Kedavra_ on me right here for sullying your honor."

"Your tongue is a byword for scandal," she murmurs, leaning into his hold. Her face grows serious, unusually serious for a sixteen-year-old. "It isn't your war, Charlus. You know how our parents feel about you enlisting – and I can't say I blame them, why must you interfere with _Muggles. _Do you want him to disown you in favor of your brother, Ethelred? My family certainly won't be happy about me marrying a pauper with naught but a blue-blooded name to his credit."

"Of course not, Nola," he smirks. "Only a prince should be allowed to besmirch your beauty with his lustful eyes, his carnal embraces, his unchaste kisses…"

"_Charlus_! Do be serious."

"Am I ever?" His face is as free and open as a little boy's and she can't help but be caught up in his infectious excitement. Nola, bound more closely to her family and the stringent, uncompromising rules of propriety than he will ever be, envies and loves him harder than ever in that balmy summer dusk – for his audacity, foolhardiness and the absolute recklessness in which he's willing to throw away his fortune and his family's approval all in the name of some silly Muggle war. _Damn Gryffindor. _

"No words of advice for me, love?" he asks, the cheeky look he usually wears back on his face. "I'm crushed."

She says nothing, only pulls off the hoop of pearls she's worn on her little finger since childhood, and presses it into his palm. "Mother will be furious," she chokes, tears falling down her cheeks. "Oh Charlus, do take care of yourself!" The words are weak, too weak to express all that she feels at this moment – anger at him, shame for her cowardice, fear for his life, pain as she wonders when she'll see him again and above all, a burning, passionate love glowing brighter from the flame of her defiance.

"I'll be waiting here for you," she whispers fiercely, leaning forward and kissing him, possessed by an exhilarating, _frightening_ passion that she's never felt before. "Right here for you – you remember that and don't you dare get yourself killed or I'll… I'll die too!" She's sixteen, still naïve, and means it.

He slips the little ring into his pocket and says nothing. "I love you," he says, as he steps off the porch, while she leans on the railing, tears running down her creamy-pale cheeks. It's the first and last time he ever says it to her. It's the last day they'll see eachother for three long, weary years (though neither of them, blissfully, know _that_) and he's eighteen and she's sixteen and they're both young enough to think that it means something.

Three years are a long time and when whistling a slow, sad Muggle war tune Charlus Potter – white-haired at twenty-one – hobbles up to the Burkes' front porch, there are no rosebuds and beautiful sunsets left for him. There's only a nineteen-year-old girl, her lavender eyes shining with newfound love, who wears a diamond hard on the middle finger of her left hand.

_**J**__ames_

'_We shall find peace. We shall hear angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.'_

_**A**__**nton Chekhov **_

**19****80**

James doesn't know whether he'll live to see another day but, perversely, he's optimistic. He stumbles into the big house – _his _house he still has to remind himself after two years of sole proprietorship – tucked at the corner of Godric's Hollow, at four in the morning, exhausted but perfectly cheerful. Grey streaks mark the brightening horizon and the low hum of the cicadas echoes with a soothing monotony as he unlocks the front door. He's alive, has survived another physically and emotionally draining night of guard duty, and that's enough to make him happy.

He finds Lily – _his _Lily, he remembers – slouched on the antique Victorian settee which his mother brought into the house as a part of her Black dowry (and properly horrified she would be too, with her quintessential Black notions about posture, at his wife). Her face is wan and creased with worry, her dark red hair straggling messily around her. A cup of tea, a few trashy, cheap Muggle paperback romances and an ash-tray full of burnt butts completes the picture. "Waiting in Wartime" he'd label it if he could just take a photo but when she hears his light footstep, she looks up – hastily straightening and stashing the paperbacks behind a cushion – and a warm smile transforms her face.

She's as happy as him, eager to forget yesterday, sanguine about tomorrow and content to live vicariously in the present. "Couldn't help myself," she mutters apologetically, pointing to the ash-tray. He nods; it's one of the bad habits she's – and only she, not he, he's never smoked in his life except the one time when he was fourteen – picked up from Sirius. "Not good for me," she sighs, patting her swollen stomach, "But there you have it. How was it, tonight? Any trouble?"

"Does it matter?"

She opens her mouth to scold him, to say of course it matters, your life's on the line, isn't it, don't you dare take things so casually, Mr Toerag-Who-I-Never-Should-Have-Married, but then she sees the wry twist of his mouth and her own sense of humor and basic honesty catches up with her. She stops and shrugs. He's right – it doesn't matter. He's safe, in front of her, as safe as he was last night when she said goodbye to him at ten o'clock, and that's all she cares about.

Tomorrow… well tomorrow's another day.

He might live or he might die. What the hell will it do to worry? Just shorten the time they have together, their precious little moments of happiness. Pointless and stupid to worry.

They're twenty-one and it's a beautiful July dawn and she's going to have the baby soon – little Harry or tiny Rose, they don't know yet – and what does it matter about the war when they're safe? The morning newspapers – and maybe the mourning, should it come down to that – will arrive soon enough but until it does, they can afford to be innocent children again. To be happy.

_**H**__arry_

'_Some have greatness thrust upon them...' _

**1996**

Harry has to remember to forget Sirius and by that he hasn't gotten over it. It… what it? The claws of memory are reservoirs of self-changing color, shading his world black and white (with not a tinge of merciful, forgiving grey), hissing into being like a lean, hungry, rust-hued wildcat. And sometimes it leaves no color, which was worst of all – just claw marks over his raw flesh, wounds which he doubts Time will ever be able to heal, they are so deep.

Obsidian-edged laughter slicing through the musty air, stirred by soaring curses, a sweep of black hair, a twirling wand and an unspoken spell and then the curtain fluttering wildly over the crumbling stone archway one last time. The details are blurred and he can't decide whether it's best this way, easier to consign it to the shadows or more difficult.

Summer is in the air, a summer of color bursting everywhere – in the flowers dancing everywhere and rainbows shimmering across the valley, in the Weasleys' wildly streaming red hair and their brightly-patched, mismatched clothes.

Ginny finds him one day, curled up on the grass, far from the broomshed, pretending to read a book. Her loosened hair flows messily around her, her faded tank-top clings, sweat-stained, to her body and she's wearing a pair of Ron's too-long, too-loose _ugly _corduroys. She's not supposed to look good but to him, today, she does. She looks so _Ginnylike_, so like a little sister, homely, sweet that when she asks him if she'll be a bother he says no, of course not, could do with some company…

She sprawls out like a cat on the grass, gathering her long hair into a ponytail, then gathering the ponytail into a bun and tying it up with a pink rubber band that clashes magnificently with her hair. Strands stick to the back of her neck and her face, grimy from trails of sweat. He watches her and as he watches, he forgets to forget. Small white fingers slip into the rich coils of her flame-red hair. A mockingbird sings some sweet, doleful lament. The wind rustles through the trees.

She's pinned up her hair and is looking thoughtfully at him – no _through _him, he realizes a moment later, like he's just a pane of glass. There's an uncanny knowledge in her bright brown eyes, far older than her fourteen years. The silence is soothing and Harry, drowning in those limpid dark pools – into those half-expressed, gossamer-light little dreams and hopes that remind him of something precious and beautiful he lost irrevocably in June – forgets to forget.

He feels her fingers on his, a gentle squeeze, nothing more. She doesn't bother to break the silence that any other girl – Tonksor Fleur, Hermione or Luna – would have by now. He feels a sudden rush of affection for her, a surge that warms his heart, for little Ginny. The burdens slip from his shoulders – prophecies and deadly foes, wars and the shadow of a blood-tinged destiny – what are they to him? The sun is bright, the wind cool and the song of the mockingbird sweeter than ever.

Life is beautiful and today in the midst of this lush, simple beauty, he can forget. It's good to forget.

_**A**__lbus_

'_The thought of war blows my mind. _

_Handed down from generation to generation. _

_Induction destruction _

_Who wants to die?'_

_**War! **_

**2025**

Al doesn't want to go.

Jamie leaves first, a laugh on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes, and though Mum cries and Dad doesn't really say much he knows that they're fiercely proud of him. There's no question of Al enlisting in the corps, he's not eighteen, sensitive (he dislikes the word but he knows it's true) and besides everyone knows the war will be over soon. So what if it's a Muggle war and the Muggle papers keep calling it the beginning of the Third World War – hinting darkly at the unhindered use of nuclear armaments and biological warfare. This is 2023 and the human race is above such savageries – _It'll be over in a month, max, and with the Ministry chipping in with the new corps it might be over in a fortnight with minimal damage to both parties concerned. Your brother's a fool for wasting his time to join, _Scorpius says dismissively.

The UAE against the USA. Ostentatiously described as the War over Oil, Albus is prescient enough to understand that the situation is not as simple as it seems and maybe the Muggle tabloids – notorious for exaggeration – are right. It's a frightening thought but there it is – East against West, Muggle against Wizard. The Ministries of northern Africa, central and southern Asia, hell, _China_ the new superpower of the world openly declare their stance – to the wizarding populations of course, the Muggles remain ignorant of the existence of magic until late-2024.

And then one cold night in October, 2024, while Al and Shweta Thomas are innocently – or maybe not so innocently – groping and making out in a Muggle pub in London, someone switches on the TV quite suddenly – after a call, Al later guesses – to the BBC. Her fingers fumbling under the waistband of his jeans, his slipping under her bra, they learn the news that will change the course of the world. The words, the looks of shock on the face of both the reporter on the TV screen and the viewer remain sharp in his memory for the rest of his short life – _almost the whole of Pakistan, vast stretches of northern and western India, including the capital of Delhi, use of the Supernova-Hydrogen Bomb, casualties totaling to at least seventy million lives. _

And then it all spirals outrageously, dramatically out of control and he's left wondering who the fuck he is, he can't be eighteen-year-old Al Potter anymore because this just isn't his life…

Before the night is out, magical warfare is added to the grisly mixture, and the British Minister for Magic himself appears personally on Muggle TV to inform the terrified hordes about a secret that's been jealously guarded for four hundred years. Fuckfuckfuck. Hogwarts and Hogsmeade are razed before the week is out – magic and nuclear bombs working simultaneously, in perfect harmony – and there are no magical children above the age of ten or below seventeen in the UK left.

What a wonderful, efficient way to destroy the future resources of a country, Al thinks bitterly at the quiet ceremonials for his little baby sister Lily, inquisitive Hugo who's now been effectively silenced forever, twelve-year-old Ursula Malfoy, the adorable little Scamander twins and all the other boys and girls he's known, hated, loved, grown up with, played with, fought, dated in some cases … How fucking brilliant.

Rose, her expressive face as blank and frozen as her mother's now, goes next, a slip of a girl of eighteen. The last time he sees her, it's drizzling. Her once waist-length ruddy brown hacked short chin-length makes her look younger than she is, so vulnerable that he can't believe that she, his baby cousin whom he had to look out for at Hogwarts (and make sure she wasn't getting herself killed or killing other people), is going away, probably to die (the casualties reported in the papers every day make him sick to the bones, though he doesn't know those people and they're only statistics, figures in black ink on thin white paper to him, it still _hurts_). "Take care of Mum and Daddy for me," she whispers, "Don't leave them or Aunt Ginny or Uncle Harry either – I'm counting on you, Al. You're the only left."

It's true too, and that's what's frightening.

She dies before 2024 bleeds into 2025, before she's nineteen years old. Al can't remember her as she used to be when the news comes – as self-important, alternatively hyper and malevolent or uncannily serious and thoughtful. He forgets the laughing, red-haired girl with the dreamy, pale-blue eyes and thinks only of a mangled, bloody corpse lying next to and under other such similarly dismembered bodies.

When he Floos down and tells Scorpius, still in mourning for bratty, sweet Ursula who in spite of all her obnoxiousness didn't deserve to die at twelve (so fucking goddamn _young_), about Rose, the boy is oddly quiet and belatedly, Al realizes that in his own, bend-around-the-bush way Scorpius was in love with her. Maybe not just as a little sister. The last of the Malfoys, he goes out in glory one crisp spring day, his pale blond hair glistening like gold under the glare of the afternoon sun.

"Look after my parents," Scorpius tells him too, and Al promises. His voice quivers because though he's young enough to rush off to _meet_ death openly (instead of cowering in dark corners and hiding like any sane adult would do), he's old enough to know just how grisly a war can be and how macabre the way to death is. "If anything happens to me… well, I know they'll be in safe hands."

It's Al, who still feels like a stupid, blundering little child at nineteen, who tells Draco and Asteria. They say nothing and to Al, trudging away from the Manor an hour later, it's the worst thing they could do.

It's the adults next – Britain's Golden (now Graying) Trio, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger-Weasley. Neville Longbottom's ashes lie buried under the shambles of Hogwarts while Luna Scamander, driven insane by the death of her sons, her darling little babies Lorcan and Lysander, is entered into St. Mungo's. And Ginny… well she listens to her husband as she's listened to him since she was sixteen – and waits at home. It's all just one big crazy mess – Al is tempted to say fucking but that would be abusing the daily quota of swear-words he's assigned himself – and he tries to lose himself under piles and piles of paperwork (not hard with a Ministry job in wartime).

But then it's Shweta, her silky black hair held up in place by chopsticks, who sits on his bed, wearing his shirt and his boxers – he loves her like that – who calmly tells him that she's leaving next week to join the Medical Unit. "It's my duty," she says, her always-musical voice uncolored by any inflection or personal sentiment. She sounds callous and cold but Al, his heart sinking, knows that she's just as frightened as he is, just… braver.

And that's the last straw.

"Not without me," he whispers and Shweta arches a neatly-trimmed eyebrow and falls back on his bed, telling him not to be stupid, that _his_ place is right here, at home because that's the kind of person he is…

Al goes off to war not because he loves her – he does, but not enough to risk his life for hers, he's not that type – or because she's stirred up any latent sense of duty within him. It's just because he doesn't want to have to promise her to look after her parents, because he's not ready to hear her name being added – as it will, she's so inexperienced and young, it will – to the long list of names to be carved on tombstones. For once, he wants somehow else to be the one to carry the news of _his _death to his mother (an eerie prescience tells him that his father won't outlive him).

**A/N: ****Looks like everything in this world is possible – I wrote Ginny as a main character without parodifying her from here to the Fiji Islands! Wow! In case you like this but don't know what to say in a review, you can answer these questions:-**

**Which segment did you like most? **

**Which character appealed to you most? **

**Were the quotes suitable to describe the segments?**

**Did all the Potter men sort of blur together into one character in your mind? Should they be more distinctive?**

**Should I do stories like this? Would you be interested in reading a Lucretia-Molly-Ginny-Lily Jr. story on the same lines as this? **

**More evidence that the Potter men are dreadfully repetitive…**

**Fionnghuala – White shoulder**

**Lily – White flower**

**Ginevra – ****White, fair smooth**

**Shweta**** – White**


End file.
